Escalating energy costs and increased awareness of environmental impact of energy consumption are some of the reasons enterprises are increasingly attempting to manage and optimize energy utilization. However, energy planning, particularly for enterprises with a network of geographically separate sites, such as restaurants, retail stores, and banks, is not currently effective. Enterprises are often unable to plan energy consumption at a site level due to ineffective energy consumption monitoring processes and inability to obtain granular or temporal consumption data. Site level managers are often not effective at managing energy consumption or, if they do have such expertise, can be costly. Additionally energy consumption profiles of network sites tend to vary. Accordingly, enterprises are unable to automatically and dynamically assess consumption and generate actionable intelligence for optimizing consumption.
Significantly, energy planning is also not effective due to the lack of correlation of business intensity with energy utilization. Business intensity can be analyzed based on service windows or time windows in a business day, or other time period, during which business intensity varies from other time windows in the business day. Absent such granular, service window based energy consumption data, enterprises are unable to effectively manage and optimize energy consumption across a network of sites.